I wanted to like this more than I did. There’s a lot of promise in the description (A necromancer and spy goes a city that on the brink of open revolution to offer financial aid to the revolutionaries) but the execution doesn’t have a lot of momentum to it.

Part of the problem is that too many of the names are similar. Part is that the protagonist’s mission does not seem particularly difficult to execute. Part is that the text feels awfully slack. There are betrayals, murders, bombings, magic duels, allies switching sides, forbidden attraction, and more, but I never felt that pull that makes it hard to put a book down. I was never powerfully attached.

The second one was much better. The first one had a mad mish-mash of Southeast Asian names (from countries that are in real life widely separated by history, geography and culture), which really threw me off.